Hardwood Grows Slowly

On reading Slow Productivity, reading poetry with Hala Alyan and creating summer intentions

Writers “often go way out of their way to find somewhere –anywhere – to work that’s not inside their own homes. Even if it meant putting up with the clanging hammers of a furnace repair shop. The problem is that the home is filled with the familiar and the familiar snares our attention, destabilizing the neuronal dance required to think clearly. When we pass the laundry basket outside our home office (aka our bedroom) our brain shifts toward a household-chores context, even when we would like to maintain focus on whatever pressing work needs to get done. This phenomenon is a consequence of the associative nature of our brains. Because the laundry basket is embedded in a thick, stress-inducing matrix of under-attended household tasks, it creates what the neuro-scientist Daniel Levitin describes as “a traffic jam of neural nodes trying to get thru to consciousness. In this context, work tumbles forward as one stress-inducing demand among many. [..] A citadel to creative concentration need not be a literal palace. It just needs to be free of laundry baskets.” (Slow Productivity, p.159-160)

Lately my Youtube algorithm has shifted to videos of people describing how they designed and decorated their apartment, taking what is often a drab, dark space of 200, 400 or 600 square feet and transforming it completely into a home in which one can host, cook, sleep and spend one’s leisure hours.

This morning I watch a woman in a sleeveless black and white checkered dress walk through her New York railroad style apartment and share “that when it comes to her apartment, she likes to think in vignettes.” “When I’m building my vignettes”, she explains, gesturing to her kitchen table, “I like to think of the shapes in them. This bench is rectangular, this painting is rectangular, and so this mirror and table are circular.” Through the whole apartment she shows us how she has created vignettes, or little moments through curtains and paint. She walks through her under 600 square feet apartment and shares how she re-designed the bathroom, changed the kitchen cupboard handles, bought a new fridge, painted each room, created “curtain moments”, bought a whole marble slab from a stone yard to use in a new countertop and other surfaces in the apartment.

I watch the videos, but this feels like the wrong season for apartment upgrades. My favourite vignette right now is the one right outside our living room window. In it I can see the hedges outlining our patio, my husband’s planter boxes and a large tree with branches open to the sky, inviting a variety of birds to call it home. It reminds me of a cauliflower stalk. I sit on the sofa and watch hummingbirds drink nectar, small birds eat bugs and seeds, and birds of all sizes flit from branch to branch, and down and up again. I watch and listen to the birds chatter in the morning and wonder about the gossip that is shared, who is visiting whom, what the morning news is.

By mid-morning the birds are gone, off to complete the tasks of their day before they return in the evening. I admire the way their activities follow the rhythms of the day. With their example, they teach us that it is summer in Vancouver and before the months of rain arrive, this is the season to contain one’s work to certain hours. Despite the summer often being a very busy season as a consultant, this is the season to kayak, to admire sunsets, to stretch out at the beach over long summer evenings with cold coffees and creamy ice cream cones, to get one’s books salt-stained and wrinkled, to soak up as much Vitamin D as I can. I’ve been struggling with a cough that has left me exhausted and as a result have been more indoors than out lately, but seeing the birds is a reminder to create new patterns and rhythms and to be brave and explore.

Recently I read a book about productivity called Slow Productivity: The Lost Art of Accomplishment Without Burnout by Cal Newport and while the book itself is only okay, one of its recommendations is that humans have always varied their intensity of work through the day, year, seasons¹.

The premise of this book is that when knowledge work became a more prevalent economic sector, unlike industrial or agricultural sectors, it did not/does not have clear definitions of what constitutes productivity. As a result, what organizations and managers consider to be productive work is often simply presence, and workers are burned out:

“It was from this uncertainty that a simple alternative emerged: using visible activity as a crude proxy for actual productivity. If you can see me in my office —or, if I’m remote, see my email replies and chat messages arriving regularly, —-then, at the very least, you know I’m doing something.  The more activity you see, the more you can assume that I’m contributing to the organization’s bottom line.”²

The result of this is deep burnout in the workplace:
”The relentless overload that’s wearing us down is generated by a belief that “good” work requires increasing busyness - faster responses to email and chats, more meetings, more tasks, more hours.”³

Newport calls this “pseudo-productivity”:⁴ the use of visible activity as the primary means of approximating actual productive effort” and argues that creating solution is not as easy as simply stopping work because it is a system-wide problem:

“Moves to maintain telecommuting or reduce the workweek help blunt some of the worst side effects of pseudo-productivity but do little to address the root problem itself. These ideas are the equivalent of responding to the growth of fast-food culture by demanding McDonald’s make its meals somewhat more nutritious - it would help tame some of the health impacts of this food, but not challenge the culture that makes hasty eating necessary in the first place.”⁵

The alternative that Newport proposes in this book is what he calls “slow productivity” “a philosophy for organizing knowledge work efforts in a sustainable and meaningful manner based on the following three principles: 1) Do fewer things 2) Work at a natural pace 3) Obsess over quality.⁶

The book could have ended there, but it doesn’t, and the remainder of the book devotes a chapter to each of these principles. Each principle is illustrated with stories of people Newport says are examples of slow productivity followed by suggestions of how to employ these principles in your own life.

This is where the book weakens. Many of the examples are absurdly unrelatable and though Newport sort of acknowledges this, it would have been better to have more recent and more diverse examples. Instead, whether it is stories of writers retreating to country estates, or Edith Wharton dropping pages on the floor for a secretary to later type up⁷, or Austen retreating away from social activities,⁸ many of the examples outlined in this book are hard to trace onto a life in the modern era.

The book says that it is meant for people with high levels of autonomy in their work life, whether they work in an office, or as a freelancer or solopreneur. In that case it would have been more useful to have stories of people with multiple competing responsibilities, trying to make their way in a cost of living crisis and show how rest and slow productivity is incorporated into the life of these workers. As the book progresses the examples become more modern but there are not enough contemporary examples here.

I agree with his general point about the importance of being boundaried and protective over your time and being guided by a clear sense of purpose, but this book needed a stronger power and economic analysis. As a result, much of this book felt jarring.

Despite its faults, this book was a reminder on the power of schedules, habits, and patience. Here are my takeaways:

1. Proposition: Contain the Small

   • Put tasks on autopilot. “Assign regularly activities to specific times on specific days, and sometimes even specific locations each week.” (83)

   • “Once you get used to accomplishing a  specific type of task at the same time on the same days, the overhead required for their execution plummets.” (84)

   • “A key refinement to support this task-centric version of autopilot scheduling is to leverage rituals and locations. If you can connect a regularly recurring task block to a specific location, perhaps paired with a little ritual that helps initiate your efforts, you’re more likely to fall into a regular rhythm of accomplishing this work.” (85)

2. Five year plans

   • Make a five year plan: craft a plan that covers “what you would like to accomplish in the next five years.” (130) This allows for slower development. Using Lin Manuel Miranda, Jewel, Ira Glass, and Alanis Morrisette as examples, Newport talks about the importance of having a longer time scale for one’s goals, and having patience with one developing the taste and skill for the art you want to produce. Lin Manuel Miranda wrote “In the Heights over seven years, and grew in that time, had multiple starts that ultimately benefited the project. Jewel took a smaller record deal so that there would be less pressure to produce and she would have more time to develop her skills and sound.

   Principle 3: Obsess Over Quality

   • Hardwood grows slowly (170)

   • “If you collect modest drops of meaningful effort for 365 days, you’ll end the year with a bucket that is pretty damn full. This is what ultimately matters: where you end up, not the speed at which you get there, or the number of people you impress with your jittery busyness along the way.” (219)

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Things I Loved

To Watch

Inside Out 2 (in theatres now): This sequel to Inside Out beautifully illustrates the role of anxiety in our lives, how our anxiety tries to keep us safe, and argues that rather than shaming or squashing our feelings, a more compassionate approach (what in somatics is called blending) supports us in creating enough safety to live in a range of emotions. I wished the protagonist was racialized because I was more curious about the protagonist’s friends than her herself, but I still enjoyed the film.

We Are LadyParts Season 2 (Streaming on Global TV): Season One of this show was about a group of Muslim female punk musicians coming together as a band called Lady Parts, Season 2 expands their journey. In this season, we meet them after a successful touring season, trying to figure out what their next steps are. How do they record an album? Who should represent them? Is there enough space for other Muslim female musicians? Are others competition or companions? What does love and self identity look for each of the women in the band? This season asks all of these questions.

To Read

The Moon that Turns You Back by Hala Alyan (March 2024)

These poems are a triumph. This is a creative, experimental, astonishing collection of poems that demand re-reading and analysis to see how they work so beautifully. The poems here are about grief and loss and life and survival. Many of these poems are about recurrent pregnancy loss, [including poems that are simply shaded out pregnancy reports/medical reports with a few word bolded for us to read] but there are poems here about Gaza, about exile, about fertility, about nervous system regulation, about the moon. These poems were so good they knocked me sideways and nourished me in a way that only Hala Alyan’s writing can.

I took a writing course with Hala Alyan in the spring in which we spoke about writing as a means of healing, and how “trauma dislocates us from a sense of coherence in the world and dislocates us from a sense of coherence internally.”⁹ Writing can support our mental wellness defined as “how well we are able to integrate the things we are exposed to, the things we witness, the things that happen to us, even harm we cause so that there is no one experience that is the only defining one,”¹⁰ because it allows us to reclaim our experiences.

Hala Alyan spoke about how it is hard to be an "artist working in any medium if you are not actively engaging in witnessing continuously, and then thinking about how to translate that witnessing into something else that can be then be witnessed by someone else.”¹¹ That course was about "telling stories” instead of “allowing shame to fester” and was an experience in reading closely and taking risks. This collection was so fiercely truthful, and reading them, I felt emboldened to be truthful as well. I’m looking forward to returning to these poems in the months to come and deciphering them more closely.

To Listen

City Arts and Lectures Series: Hanif Abdul Raqib with Shereen Marisol:

This conversation about Hanif Abdul Raqib’s new book There’s Always This Year is one to savour slowly. In it, Hanif Abdul Raqib talks about “how the job of the living is to be unflinchingly honest”, about mortality, about homecomings, about joy and hope, about Gaza, about artists that increase his own commitment to his craft, about a Nike commercial that always gets him teary, He speaks about what it means to live itself.

1. Not a recommendation that originates with this book

2. Slow Productivity, p.20

3. p.7

4. p.22

5. p.37

6. p.37

7. p.80

8. p.51

9. Hala Alyan, Silk Road Literary Lab, April 15 2024.

10. Hala Alyan, Silk Road Literary Lab, April 15 2024.

11. Hala Alyan, Silk Road Literary Lab, April 22 2024.